The Woman Who Wasn't There

He’d noticed the tattoo when he was examining the body. “Rachel” in common ink. “Not exactly top grade,” he commented.

“He was probably stoned out of his mind when he got it. That doesn’t promote the best judgment as to where to get one,” she said. “He was lucky he didn’t get blood poisoning from a dirty needle.”

“Whatever luck he might have had ran out today,” Troy said.

“Yeah, it did.” She sighed, glancing around the room. Anywhere but at the chalked outline. “I figure his daughter has a right to know that he’s dead and didn’t just take off and leave her.”

There was something in the way she said the last part that had him looking at Delene. And wondering.

“Is that the way it happened?” he asked softly. He knew he was intruding, but she’d been the one who had inadvertently thrown it out there.

Delene pulled back her shoulders, as if unconsciously bracing for a blow. “What?”

“To you,” he said, taking the same tone with her that his cousin Patience took with the wounded animals she cared for in her capacity as veterinarian. “Did your father leave your mother. And you?”

Her expression hardened. All traces of friendliness vanished. “Don’t try to analyze me, Cavanaugh. You’re out of your league. I just felt sorry for the poor slob. And for the little girl he brought into the world. End of story.” All totaled, she’d worked with Clyde Petrie for almost three months, inheriting his file when another officer had retired. She’d made it a point to learn his background, to know what she was up against. “I know he tried to clean up twice, always saying that a daughter deserved to be proud of her father.”

She looked around once more. The motel room looked no better in the late-afternoon light than it had in the predawn hours. An oppressive feeling of hopelessness seemed woven in with the stains and the grime. That and an almost disabling loneliness.

“I thought maybe he had her address here or a phone number.” It was her intention to exhaust the regular avenues of search before resorting to the Internet.

Tying up those loose ends wasn’t exactly within the probation department’s jurisdiction, but he liked the way the woman thought. “Do you know what her mother’s name is?” he asked.

Delene shook her head. “Clyde never married her so it’s not on our records. I wouldn’t have known about the girl at all except during one of the department’s impromptu visits, I found Clyde sitting by the window, holding her picture. There were tears in his eyes. He told me she was four, maybe five. He wasn’t too good with dates.”

Troy had his own thoughts about the origin of those tears. Probably Clyde realized that he didn’t have enough money to score, he thought. “Well, I guess he wasn’t ready to take on the dad from The Brady Bunch for the title of Father of the Year.”

She moved her shoulders in a half-dismissive shrug. “I suppose Clyde did the best he could, given how weak he was.” This time she did look down at the chalk outline. “At least he tried.”

What was she really doing here? Troy wondered. He caught himself wondering other things about her, as well. Things if he asked, he was confident he’d only get a flippant response to. He decided that once he was off-duty, he was going to do a little homework. See just what he could find out about Agent Delene D’Angelo. If all else failed, he was pretty sure he could always ask Brenda, his brother Dax’s new wife. The woman could make a computer do anything but sit up and beg—and maybe even that, too.

“Want me to help you look around?” he offered.

The first response that occurred to Delene was she didn’t want to be indebted to anyone. Favors required favors in return.

“It’s not that big a place,” she told him, then reconsidered. This was his crime scene, not hers. Technically he could order her off. “Sure, why not? Two sets of eyes are usually better than one.” Approaching the largest pile of fast-food wrappers, discarded soda cups and stained carryout bags, she paused to take out her gloves. “What is it that you’re looking for? Just in case I stumble across it first.”

He gave her a grin that she found much too engaging. “I don’t know.”

Their eyes met. Hers were incredulous. “You don’t know?”

Admitting it didn’t seem to phase him, and she found that unusual. Most men liked to look as if they knew what they were doing.

“Nope. Just that I’ll know it when I see it,” he said.

Her mouth quirked and he felt something skip a beat inside his chest. Probably had to do with the burrito he’d had for breakfast. Ordinarily, three days out of five, breakfast time would find him at his uncle’s house, seated at a table that never seemed to run out of leaves or chairs in its ever-expanding mode.

His father’s older brother, Uncle Andrew, had put himself through the academy as a short-order cook in a diner. When he retired to raise what was, at the time, his motherless family, Uncle Andrew indulged himself in his only passion outside of law enforcement and his family. Cooking.

And when, one by one, the members of his family began to spread their wings and fly away from home, he’d insisted on having everyone return each morning for breakfast. To entice them, Andrew went all-out, preparing not just a meal but what could pass as a gourmet feast. Troy hadn’t been able to make it to Uncle Andrew’s house this morning, because of the homicide call. So breakfast had turned out to be the first semiedible thing he could get his hands on.

Troy knew exactly what expression would descend over his uncle’s face if the older man heard that he’d grabbed a breakfast burrito at a fast-food restaurant.

“You’ve obviously been watching too many cop shows,” Delene was saying to him.

Actually, he found himself addicted to the slew of crime dramas that were on the air, taping the ones he didn’t get a chance to watch. He flashed her another grin. “Doesn’t make it any less true.”

He thought he heard her say something about the level of intelligence of the new wave of detective these days, but he couldn’t be sure. The next moment, she was riffling through the drawers in the battered and scarred bureau that dominated the wall beside the tiny bathroom.

He let the comment go.

Between them, they went over the entire length and breadth of the motel room, coming up empty when they finished.

It bothered Delene that she couldn’t even find Rachel’s photograph. She found it telling.

“Why is this significant?” Troy asked.

She closed the closet. The hangers had been empty. Whatever clothing Clyde had possessed was in the heaps on the floor.

“Because someone must have taken the photo,” she told him. “I know I saw it.”

“Why would someone want to take a picture of a drug dealer’s daughter? It’s not as if they could kidnap her and hold her for ransom. It certainly doesn’t look as if Clyde had any money.”

“Not just any someone,” she corrected him. “Her mother.” Maybe the woman, whoever she was, didn’t want him having anything to do with the little girl.

“Or,” Troy theorized, “Petrie could have easily lost it.”

Delene didn’t believe that. She shook her head. “It meant too much to him.”

“When he was sober,” Troy pointed out. “All bets are off when he was high.”

But Delene remained unmoved. “Some things remain constant, even for addicts.”

He wondered if the woman even realized that she had become passionate about her subject. “Is that firsthand knowledge?” he asked.

Her chin rose defensively. “That’s firsthand information. The people the county has on probation are not exactly all the crème de la crème.”

Which led him to the question that had been echoing in his head since he first laid eyes on her this morning. He couldn’t see her going down into the trenches, getting dirty in their filth. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a business like this?”

Now there was a line, Delene thought. “Earning a living.”

“Got to be other ways to do it.”

She looked at the piles of wrappers. It was hard not to just scoop them up and throw them away. She hated chaos, always had. “I like the hours,” she quipped.

“You mean round-the-clock?” Troy scoffed. “What are you, a bat?”

“Get your facts straight, Detective. Bats don’t operate during the day.”